In Defense Against the Dark Arts class, the Hogwarts students come up against a boggart, which takes the shape of the thing they most fear. In order to combat it, they incant the spell Riddikulus! while thinking of a way to make their feared object into something utterly laughable (for example, Ron makes a giant spider funny by removing all its legs).
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| Neville makes his biggest fear look pretty ridiculous in the Prisoner of Azkaban movie! |
The great thing is, for those of us who are in Christ, we have that kind of defense. It's called the truth - that is, the Word of God - and it's not to be taken lightly. Our fears will come against us using all the negative power of our weak human mind, but we have a sure way to stop them where they stand.
Fear (of the boggart sort) is not from God. We are commanded to have faith instead. I'm reading in Mark right now, and one of his primary themes is faith as the antidote to fear. "Do not fear, only believe," he says in Mark 5:36, even as one of the greatest fears of humankind, death, lay before them.
We can have faith because we know the truth, and we can repeat the truth to ourselves because it's been given to us in the form of the Bible. Even if we can't think of a specific verse right off the bat to combat our fears at a given moment, we can remember the sure and unchanging character of God that we have learned. That he is good. Holy. All-knowing. Just. Compassionate. Merciful. Almighty.
And the legs fall off the spider, and the boggart retreats back into its dark box.
We can laugh, because the overwhelming perfection of Christ makes our fears look so small, and so, well, riddikulus. :)
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